‘Why did your Meeting grow?’ ask Friends
'If your meeting has grown, what has helped it do so? If it has declined, is there any clue to what caused the change?’
Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM) is investigating why some Meetings grow and others decline. The consideration follows an analysis of the Tabular Statement, the annual report of all Quakers in Britain, which reveals that ‘between 2009 and 2019, 105 local meetings – a quarter of our society – grew in size’.
‘Thirty-six of them have more than doubled. This is fantastic news for Friends – and something that bears further investigation. Why did these meetings grow?’ writes Penny Elliott, BYM’s coordinator of the Tabular Statement, in the Quakers in Britain blog.
The figures come amid a backdrop of overall falling numbers, however, like all church membership in Britain, with the median size of a Quaker Local Meeting now twenty-one individuals, while in 2009 it was twenty-four. ‘However, decline is not inevitable,’ writes Penny Elliott. ‘We’re also curious to hear directly from Quakers in meetings. If your meeting has grown, what has helped it do so? If it has declined, is there any clue to what caused the change?’
Small Meetings are more likely to be growing than large Meetings, according to the Edinburgh Quaker newsletter ‘Terrace Talk’, which has also published statistics on modern-day Quakerism.
BYM membership is down by more than half from its peak in the mid-twentieth century, to 12,498 in 2019, says the newsletter. ‘One new member in each of the 470 local meetings next year would stop the fall,’ it says.
Since 2009, twenty-two per cent of Local Meetings have grown by ten per cent or more, while fifty-four per cent of Local Meetings have shrunk by ten per cent or more. More than half the Meetings losing membership are ‘largish’, with twenty or more members.
